Mortality

[Juno]

(yes, I did the titles like that on purpose)

In video games, death can serve multiple mechanical roles???it is most commonly used as a thing you want to avoid, a goal you need to accomplish, or as a narrative device. While death is prominent in many video games, we generally give it much less thought and treat it with much less seriousness than actual death, especially when it comes to player death.

This could be from a lack of permanence in most video games. Mechanics like life systems (a certain amount of retries designated to a player after they?ve died) and respawning (when a player reappears at a fixed point in the game, after they die) have been a staple in many video games, but subsequently remove the seriousness and finality of death???acting more as an interruption or annoyance rather than the actual consequences of death.

Was reading this little article earlier about death in games (if you want to keep reading it, it's here), and I thought it might be an interesting topic for us.

Permadeath, respawning, life bars, etc. are all common staples in a lot of games. Are there any games you played in particular that had a more interesting death mechanic, be it for players or NPCs? What kind of death is the most annoying to you? Most "fun"? Not all game-deaths are equal - some punish you a lot harder than others; do you find the difficult challenge of staying alive in some games more rewarding?

It's a pretty broad topic, those are just some discussion points to think about, but feel free to comment on anything about mortality in games here. :)

 

[TY]

Death isn't fun i need a very high K/D along with T-posing to assert my dominance over the plebians >:(

the most annoying death is death by a thousand mines... ironic cause thats what I do oops

 

[CodeHelmet]

If you've ever played games back in the early days of gaming, Death was a very hard penalty. In one game I played a lot in Contra, you lost all your powerups and had to go with the base default gun that sucked hard lol. In some parts of the game, having the basic gun was a death sentence so dying really was something you didn't want to do. It wasn't just Contra where death sucked balls but any FPS was that way too(notably Doom).

 

[Gabriel8897 (Hello)]

Death ins't fun at all in old platform games like super mario bros. since if you waste all of your lives you go back to the menu, the most annoying death for me is dying by an really hard enemy in fps's.